The present invention relates in general to telecommunication systems, and more particularly, to an apparatus, method and system for providing call progress information for multiple leg telecommunication sessions for intelligent network services.
With the advent of increasingly sophisticated telecommunication services, various proposals have been made to allow a single call, incoming to a telecommunication switch, to branch into multiple, independent outgoing calls (or legs) to different called parties, during the same period of time. These incoming and multiple outgoing calls may be wireline, such as PSTN (public switched telephone network), ISDN (integrated services digital network), or T1/E1 wireline calls, or may be wireless, such as cellular calls or other mobile service communications.
Once such proposal is included in the ANSI-41 specification promulgated by the American National Standards Institute for wireless telecommunication, such as cellular communication, and is referred to as xe2x80x9cflexible alertingxe2x80x9d. The ANSI-41 flexible alerting specification, however, does not include any specific directions or guidelines for implementation and control of such independent, concurrent outgoing multiple leg calls.
The ANSI-41 flexible alerting specification also does not include the provision of call progress and status information to, for example, provide intelligent network services. As disclosed in the fifth related application, such intelligent network services includes the variation of the list or pattern of outgoing call legs, to parties other than those initially specified.
Other prior art systems which utilize call progress information for various purposes are generally not automatic; rather information from sources such as billing records may be collected and analyzed by an individual person, who at a later date then manually enters system changes on the basis of his or her analysis. In addition, such provision of call progress information is not in real time, is static until manually changed again, and is not automatically and immediately updated on a dynamic basis.
As a consequence, a need remains for an apparatus, method and system to provide call progress and status information for multiple leg telecommunication sessions for intelligent network services. Such an apparatus, method and system should provide such call progress information automatically and without user intervention, should be user friendly, and should be user transparent. Such call progress information should also be provided in real time and on a dynamic basis, to be responsive to changing environmental and user conditions which may arise in wireless or wireline communication systems.
An apparatus, method and system are disclosed for providing supplemental call progress and status information for multiple leg telecommunication sessions, such as for flexible alerting, for intelligent network services. Such supplemental call progress information is useful, for example, as disclosed in the fifth related application, for varying the membership (termination list) of a flexible alerting group, dynamically and in real time. In the preferred embodiment, such call progress information includes parameters, for each outgoing call leg, such as a time to answer, an answer reason, a no answer reason, a busy reason, a page response reason, a no page response reason, and a routing failure reason.
The preferred wireless system embodiment includes a home location register and a mobile switching center. The home location register stores a plurality of secondary directory numbers associated with a pilot directory number. The mobile switching center differentially processes and routes each outgoing call leg associated with each secondary directory number, to form a plurality of outgoing call legs. As the various outgoing call legs may be answered, not answered, released, have routing failures, or return busy signals, the mobile switching center generates corresponding call progress and status information. The mobile switching center transmits the call progress and status information to the home location register, for subsequent dynamic utilization in providing intelligent network services, preferably utilizing a modified, ANSI-41compatible information directive.
Numerous other advantages and features of the present invention will become readily apparent from the following detailed description of the invention and the embodiments thereof, from the claims and from the accompanying drawings.